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This blog is still really new, and participating in the 30 day book challenge has been such a fantastic way to get used to blogging as well as taking a wonderful trip down memory lane, thinking of books to write about in answer to these questions.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading along with me so far, especially those who have commented, and thanks to Becky from Blogs-Of-A-Bookaholic for the brilliant questions.

Okay, that’s enough of the Oscar speech. I will get on with the post.

There are a lot of books that I haven’t been able to put down, especially when coming to the end. There are some books where I get to a certain point that I will physically not be able to stop until I have finished, no matter what else I need to do or what the time is. I call that point the “run in”.

However, some books I find it very difficult to stop from beginning to end. The last book I read where I genuinely couldn’t put it down and read it all in one sitting was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

This is the story of Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered by her neighbour. Afterwards, she becomes stuck in a kind of limbo, stuck in between earth and heaven where she can build her own world and watch over her family as they struggle to cope with her murder and the fact that her body is never found.

This book grabbed me right from the first line:-

“My name was Salmon, like the fish, first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973”.

The writing is so good I couldn’t stop – Alice Sebold deals so sensitively with the issues and the reactions and coping strategies of her family are so real. The glimpses of Susie’s life before she was murdered are so intense, such as her first kiss with Ray. I particularly enjoyed Grandma Lynn, whom Susie had never really warmed to in life but loved her in death as she became the linchpin of the family. I also loved the drama of Susie’s father and sister coming to suspect their neighbour, especially when Lindsay is almost caught snooping in the house. I loved the imagination behind the world that Susie inhabits. I loved the loose endings – those that were tied up and those that weren’t.

This isn’t the kind of book with a massive cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. But still at the end of each chapter I couldn’t help but read on, just because I felt that I knew these people and I wanted to see them all (including Susie who has to come to terms with her own death) come out the other side. So I stayed up to the small hours, devouring every single word.

And that’s that. The 30 day book challenge is over. I hope you have enjoyed reading along. I know I’ve enjoyed writing it.